““A Time when Roots won’t Matter”: The Farce of Identity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth”
MA Thesis Literatuur en Cultuurkritiek, Utrecht University
Andriesa van der Klis 3342387
Dr. B. Bagchi
Dr. P.J.C.M. Franssen
January 2015
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Table of Contents
1
Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 3
1.1 White Teeth: A Novel of Hybridity .................................................................................. 5
1.2 Humour as Farce in White Teeth ...................................................................................... 8
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3
4
5
White Teeth and the Farce of Identity ............................................................................... 13
2.1
Farce in White Teeth .................................................................................................. 14
2.2
Living in the Past: Samad Iqbal and Archibald Jones ............................................... 18
2.3
Selective Memory: Joyce as the Epitome of Chalfenist Racism ............................... 23
In-Betweenness: Negotiating Past and Present ................................................................. 26
3.1
“Like a Breath of Fresh Air”: Alsana and Clara ........................................................ 27
3.2
The Faults of Our Fathers: Magid and Millat ............................................................ 31
3.3
Crossing Borders: Irie Ambrosia Jones ..................................................................... 34
Smith’s Double Vision of the Future ................................................................................ 38
4.1
Multiculturalism and the Farce of Identity ................................................................ 39
4.2
Beyond Multiculturalism: Irie as the Mother of the Future ....................................... 43
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 47
Works Cited.............................................................................................................................. 49
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1
Introduction
Zadie Smith’s first novel White Teeth, published in 2000 by Hamish Hamilton, was famously
surrounded by huge media attention. Before publication it drew attention because of news of a
large advance deal and the young age of the author, and after publication this only increased
as the novel’s theme of multi-racial London in connection to the author’s own multi-racial
background dominated discussions of White Teeth (Squires 69). The focus on Smith’s
biography and her presence in the media through for example interviews created the idea of
Smith as “a symbol of a new Britain’s self-definitions” and of the novel as “having something
to say about the condition of modern British society” (15; 77). White Teeth went on to
dominate bestseller lists, received several prizes, was published in translation around the
world, and found itself to be the focus of academic attention. Its reception was generally
positive, and especially shortly after the novel’s publication critics had little but praise to offer
for the young writer who was called “the next Salman Rushdie” by her publisher (Moss,
“White Teeth”). When criticism did come, it mostly centred on the novel’s ending as too
contrived, and on Smith’s tendency to sacrifice the depth of her characters for the sake of plot,
story, and humour (Squires 72-3). James Wood’s famous criticism sees these issues as
symptomatic of a greater phenomenon manifesting itself in the big, ambitious contemporary
novel, with magical realism turning into hysterical realism in novels which value “vitality”
and “information” above everything else, thereby sacrifice believability.
Storytelling has become a kind of grammar in these novels; it is how they structure
and drive themselves. The conventions of realism are not being abolished but, on the
contrary, exhausted, and overworked. [...] this style of writing is not to be faulted
because it lacks reality – the usual charge against botched realism – but because it
seems evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself. (Wood)
Even though the praise of the novel mentioned many stylistic and narrative aspects
like the linguistic diversity of Smith’s style and the epic quality of her story, the most
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important aspect of her novel was considered its theme of multiculturalism and the positive
representation Smith appeared to provide of it. In John McLeod’s words, “White Teeth
became the focal point for the promotion of a pointedly utopian vision of London where the
city’s polycultural admixture suggested a radical and democratizing social blueprint” (231).
Again James Wood is more critical of the presence of multiculturalism in the novel.
Connected to his criticism that the pace and vitality of the narrative supersede other
considerations, he expresses the concern that White Teeth seems to use the idea of “our
natural multicultural multiplicity” for its highly interconnected plot rather than actually
commenting on multiculturalism through its narrative. In the light of his angle of criticism on
White Teeth as being part of the big ambitious novel, he discusses Smith alongside authors
like Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace. However, most comparisons
between White Teeth and other novels have been made on the basis of its concern with
multiculturalism, immigrant identities, and hybridity. Zadie Smith is often mentioned in one
breath with authors like Sam Selvon, Caryl Phillips, and Micheal Ondaatje, as “migrant or
‘post’-immigrant” writers (Squires 75). A more frequent and perhaps more glaring
comparison is to Salman Rushdie, whose influence most see as linguistic (16), and who is
present in the novel itself through the scene where Millat attends the burning of Rushdie’s
Satanic Verses in London. Another comparison often made is to Hanif Kureishi in terms of
the theme of British immigrant life, similar techniques and tone, and their use of humour both
“to provoke and to entertain” (19). Indeed, both humour and multiculturalism, and their
combination are characteristic of White Teeth and will be central to my discussion of the
novel in this thesis. This calls for a brief discussion of both notions as a foundation for my
later analysis and discussion of the novel. I will first attempt to place White Teeth in relation
to multiculturalism, since so many different labels and genres have been attributed to the
novel because of it. In the final section I will explain how the humour so prevalent in the
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novel can be seen as a form of farce and the consequences this will have for an interpretation
of the novel.
1.1 White Teeth: A Novel of Hybridity
In his review of White Teeth Stephen Moss quotes Melissa Denes who remarked that “it
would not matter if she were a he, white and the wrong side of 40: Smith can write.” The
intention behind this remark is probably to go against the tendency to read the novel as the
direct product of Smith as a person, searching for biographical clues that linked her personally
to White Teeth, put in motion by the media circus that surrounded the novel on its publication.
However, the fact remains that it matters very much that Smith is female and “[stole] a bit of
the limelight of the infamous British “lad lit” of Martin Amis, Irvine Welsh, Will Self, Nick
Hornby et al” (O’Grady, “Empire” 19), that she was born from a Jamaican mother and an
English father and seen as a “multicultural” writer, and that she was in her early twenties
when she wrote this novel. These factors contributed greatly to White Teeth becoming a
cultural phenomenon and its author a recognised media personality. Had Zadie Smith been a
50-year-old white male, White Teeth would have been a different work, not the least in terms
of its reception. Especially her mixed racial background and the fact that her mother was an
immigrant have contributed to the tendency to identify the author in terms of her novel and
vice versa, and her young age has helped shape the vision of Zadie Smith as representative of
the voice of a new generation of writers who address issues of race and identity from a
multicultural perspective. Claire Squires defines White Teeth as “a postcolonial fiction,
[because] it speaks of race and multiculturalism” in a way that does not allow for a simplistic
interpretation of White Teeth as “an uncritical celebration of the bright multicultural color of
the Willesden streets” (43). Nick Bentley in his contribution to the book Contemporary
British Fiction on Zadie Smith’s White Teeth takes a similar position, pointing out that the
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novel celebrates diversity within a community, but emphasising that it also “shows the
problems of individuals caught up within a postcolonial world” (52). Indeed, even the title of
Kathleen O’Grady’s article on White Teeth, “The Empire Strikes Back,” suggests a
categorisation of the novel as postcolonial, using a more aggressive variant of the famous
phrase “the empire writes back” to indicate the effectiveness of the blow that she perceives
White Teeth dealt to British literature. However, even though the novel is deeply occupied
with issues of race and multiculturalism, prominently features immigrant families from
former colonies India and Jamaica, and even provides a brief glimpse of the time when India
was still England’s colony in a scene where lifelong friends Samad and Archie meet during
the Second World War, its main concern does not seem to be postcolonialism. The
postcolonial theme is almost like a backdrop, a couleur locale to the time and place Smith is
writing about, an inevitable presence in the story that Smith wishes to tell and for the
statement that she wishes to make. A similar thing can be said about the categorisation of
Smith as an immigrant writer.
Immigration plays an important role in the novel, and most of the characters have to
deal with the immigrant’s struggle to come to terms with a separation from the old and
familiar, and an inevitable confrontation with the new and its inescapable influence. Smith
also portrays the process of immigrant characters finding new ways to perceive communities
and their hierarchical power structures, and in a broader sense finding new ways to look at
and speak about the world they live in (Ostendorf 577). However, it does not appear to have
been Smith’s aim to write an immigrant novel, providing us insight into the immigrant’s
process of adaptation to and integration into the new homeland. Instead, the theme of the
immigrant experience, however important its presence in the novel, seems to be in aid of
something else. Could that something else be multiculturalism, then? If we see Smith as a
multicultural writer and White Teeth as multicultural novel, have we captured the novel that
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escaped categorisation as postcolonial or immigrant? Jonathan Sell sees White Teeth as just
that: a multicultural novel “emancipating [itself] from historical determinism” and moving
away from a concern with “historical injustices or [...] unproductive introspection” (33).
Indeed, “multicultural” might be the designation most often attributed to both the novel and
the writer. Multiculturalism is both a political practice of societal organisation favouring
accommodation of cultural diversity over monoculturalist views, and “a critique of
ethnocentricity, discrimination, national chauvinism, cultural repression and more generally
intolerance of diversity” (Fernández 52). Smith’s White Teeth is most certainly a portrayal of
a multicultural society, or even a multicultural community, and the novel might be said to be
multicultural in the sense that it seems to advocate an acceptance of cultural diversity, as well
as expose the problematics of such an endeavour. Yet again it seems that concluding that
White Teeth then is a multicultural novel is somehow incomplete. As Claire Squires points
out, stating that Zadie Smith is a multicultural author “suggests a double definition, referring
to Smith both as an author with a mixed-race background, and as an author who writes about
multiculturalism” (15). This is not only true of multiculturalism, to some extent it holds good
for all the labels that have been tried out on the novel. Postcolonial, immigrant, multicultural,
even global: they imply something about the novel as well as the author. I want to argue
however, that all these labels fall short to describe either the author or the novel. They apply
to some extent, but none of them seem to do justice to the work in its entirety. A theme that
all these labels have come to share is the notion of hybridity, which goes beyond the idea of
cultural diversity towards the emergence of a “third element produced by the interaction of
cultures, communities, or individuals” (Moss, “Politics” 12). This notion of a third space
undermines any sense of a stable or rigid cultural or ethnic identity (and arguably national
identity, although that is a discussion I lack the space to address here), as we are always
selves-in-formation (Seigel 31). This confusion of ethnic identities because of hybridization is
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a key theme in White Teeth, indeed, it may be the key theme, and it “incorporates the legacy
of empire, the assemblage of immigrants in the old imperial centers, and the multicultural
societies that are thus produced” (Squires 23). As much as hybridity is a central theme of the
novel, the hub to which all other spokes are attached, the novel itself is a hybrid of many
categories and therefore defies any attempt to pin it down as one clearly defined identity. As
Sandra Ponzanesi and Merolla point out in the introduction to Migrant Cartographies,
“[h]ybridity [...] participates in a counterhegemonic move” (7), and that seems to be White
Teeth’s endeavour too. In an increasingly globalised world the notion of hybridity and the
related issues of identity and belonging are gaining relevance and importance. As Anna Jawor
argues, identity is less and less determined by a number of clear factors like nation, social
class, or gender. Instead, “the identity of an individual is segmented, fragmented, hybrid, and
appears as a syncretic amalgamation of elements derived from different sets” (130). At the
same time, globalisation, immigration, and increasing hybridity have resulted in a tense
relationship with views that remain focused on homogenous cultural and national identities.
Any novel writing seriously about multiculturalism (or even nationalism) cannot escape
writing about hybridity, identity, and the question of belonging and the tensions and problems
connected to them.
1.2 Humour as Farce in White Teeth
Even though Smith chose to write about multiculturalism humorously, she still addressed
hybridity and the question of belonging seriously. In its hybrid concern with ethnic identities
and belonging, White Teeth ultimately attempts to address issues and experiences that are
inherently human rather than only specific to the immigrants. She attempts to go beyond the
individual or even collective immigrant experience of finding their place in a new country and
culture, towards the human experience of the fluidity of identity, portraying both its
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problematics and its potential. As Frederick Aldama suggests, White Teeth might be “the
latest shape of a long tradition of what we might call the global novel, one with a
transgeograpic reach that offers schema for critically evaluating a world beyond the
individual” (105-6). Within this tradition Smith is part of a sub-tradition of female writers
who employ humour to achieve this, as for example Virginia Woolf in Orlando. Where Smith
focuses predominantly on race and ethnicity, Woolf’s Orlando is an example of a similar
endeavour focused on gender identities, although it also includes issues like race, class, and
nation (Hovey 394). In that sense Orlando presents a more inclusive discussion of identity
than White Teeth, which mostly leaves gender and social class in relation to hybrid identities
untouched. Both novels, however, are the product of “public anxieties and historical debates
about race and nation” and much of their popularity is due to their “comic refiguring” of
contemporary discourses on identity and all its components (Hovey 394). In her article
““Kissing a Negress in the Dark”: Englishness as a Masquerade in Woolf’s Orlando,” Jaime
Hovey points out that humour functions as a masquerade in Orlando in several ways. It aided
its publication and reception, as “[t]he construction of the protagonist’s polymorphous lesbian
sexual desires as an exotic, humorous fantasy may have helped Orlando slip past the censors”
(398), whereas Radclyffe Hall’s deeply serious lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness was
involved in an obscenity trial the very same period that Orlando was published (394). The
humorous tone of Orlando masked any potentially offensive propagations of lesbianism, and
instead encouraged a reading of the novel as a “cheerful wildness,” as Woolf herself wrote in
her journal (qtd. in Hovey 398). She also uses this humorous tone to veil Orlando’s gender,
both before and after his/her change of gender (399). It is precisely this humorous ambiguity
that allows Woolf to create a character like Orlando in a homophobic social and political
climate, and that allows Orlando in the universe of the novel to move freely between the
worlds of men and women. In Orlando humour thus masks the difference between gender,
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which allows for greater liberty in portraying sexual relationships and gender identities.
In White Teeth humour also functions as a masquerade of difference, but then ethnic
and cultural differences. Smith achieves this by humorously highlighting the obvious
differences but also unexpected similarities between cultural and ethnic groups. It allows her
to create characters like a Muslim Samad Iqbal struggling with his religious identity, or an
extremist anti-Western group like KEVIN, in a political and social climate that is increasingly
xenophobic, especially towards Muslim immigrants. She disarms the political and social
tensions surrounding these groups by presenting them humorously alongside a comic
portrayal of a typically English Archibald Jones, creating a suspension of judgment and a
willingness to look at the people behind the labels that might not have been achieved had she
chosen to write this story in a more serious tone. As in Orlando, when stripped clear of the
humorous representation the novel’s theme is a very serious one. As Caryl Phillips wrote
about White Teeth, “[t]here is nothing farcical about the pain of wanting to belong. In this
respect, White Teeth is full of false smiles and contrived facts, masks that are repeatedly
donned in order to better hide the pain” (qtd. in Squires 76). Indeed, it is a serious theme and,
I would like to argue, Smith’s use of humour only helps to emphasise this as she employs it to
build an argument for hybridity throughout the novel, specifically using humour in the form
of farce.
Central to the definition of farce that will be the basis of my analysis of the novel is a
paradox. Farce is by nature brief and favours action over plot or story (Stephenson 89; Howe
5). Indeed, Barbara Cannings states that if a play “is about political, historical or religious
ideas, if its significance is symbolic rather than personal [...] it is not a farce” (560), and
Robert Heilman chides the critic who attempts to attribute more depth to farce than it warrants
according to him (123). Yet, these characteristics are only one side of the farcical coin. As
Robert Stephenson points out, there are examples of longer farce, like Oscar Wilde’s The
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Importance of Being Earnest, which are more serious behind the farcical façade, and to
provide us with a more profound thought or idea (89). In White Teeth, both manners of farce
are visible. There are short farcical scenes and bursts of farcical language, but these fragments
sustain an extended farce that runs throughout the novel, especially through the theme of
identity. In that way farce is used in White Teeth to undermine the “existing norms” of a
multicultural society (Howe 5). Some typical characteristics of farce are the play with the idea
of twins and mistaken identities (Heilman 115), its tendency to “[turn] upon the ineptitude of
people trying to cope with the perversity of objects” which leads to “a farce of
incompetence,” and marital discord (Howe 5). This little list illustrates another important
aspect of farce, its physicality. Heilman argues that “[f]arce is primarily physical” since all
energy is devoted to “bodily activity” and “no energy goes into real thought” (114). However,
Stephenson shows that language is as much a component of farce as physicality is. Farce
thrives on dialogues riddled with puns and misunderstandings (90), and even physical farce in
a novel, for example, is inevitably represented through language. A final crucial element of
farce is the use of stock characters or caricatures, because “[f]arce has litte place for
individuals, only type-characters” (Howe 5). Especially stereotyping somebody who is not
perceived to be part of the community is a great source of comic pleasure, and makes “to talk
like oneself [...] automatically funny” (Stephenson 86). This is interesting in the light of White
Teeth, as in the community that is represented there almost everybody is an outsider. The
Iqbals and Bowdens as immigrants are outsiders to English society (as are the Chalfens
through their forgotten immigrant past), Archibald Jones is essentially an outsider to the
immigrant community that he has become part of through his friendship and marriage, and the
Chalfens are outsiders as they are part of a different social class than the other families in the
novel. The fact that everybody is an outsider aids Smith’s farcical representation of the
families, while at the same time mitigating the depersonalising effect of stereotypical
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representation. Farce often functions as comic relief, providing “a brief holiday from
responsibility, a vacation from both the vulnerability that can never be eliminated and the
obligations that may never be rejected, in human existence. Farce is an hour’s respite from
order and from the absolute necessity of seeking it” (Heilman 123). Yet, farce is more than
simply a holiday from the more serious matters in life, it is also a “tonal preparation” for what
is to come, a foil against which the serious or tragic will have even more impact (Stephenson
92).
In the second chapter I will explore the general presence of farce in White Teeth, and
more specifically, the way farce is used to undermine the character’s identities, creating
farcical identities in the sense that they very often turn out to be caricatures of the thing they
most desire or most despise to be. Since Smith’s novel focuses on the idea of a future, this
notion is an important motive in the novel along with the present and the past, and will be
central to my analysis. To what extent does the characters’ inability to let go of their versions
of the past obstruct them in overcoming the farce of their own identity? The third chapter will
centre on a similar question, but focused on the bridge towards the future: the present. It are
mostly the female characters in the novel (and to a lesser extent the twins Millat and Magid)
who attempt to break free from the determining clutch of the past and acknowledge the
present in order to be able to move towards the future. They struggle to break free from a
farcical identity in an attempt to create a future where acceptance and a sense of belonging are
central to who they are. In the fourth chapter I will discuss what this analysis of the characters
as farces of identity means for the representation of multiculturalism in the novel, both in the
present that most of the novel describes, and in the future that is hinted at in the last few pages
of the novel. In what way is Zadie Smith’s representation of the characters in White Teeth a
farce of identity, and what does this imply regarding the present and the future of community
in the face of difference?
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2
White Teeth and the Farce of Identity
Identity is a complex notion and this is especially the case in Zadie Smith’s first novel, White
Teeth. Most of the characters in this novel are immigrants, children of immigrants, or from a
mixed racial background. They are struggling to come to terms with the reality of who they
are in the face of the expectations they themselves and others have of them, considering the
fact that they are ethnically and culturally different. These expectations revolve around the
issue of assimilation to the new culture they are now part of, around cultural influence that is
either desired or rejected. These complexities are not limited to the immigrants, however.
Archibald Jones, born in a family historically native to England as far as he knows (which is
indeed not very far), also struggles to find his place and sense of self, even though he is in his
homeland. The characters in White Teeth construct their identities, as well as their idea of
others, around a strong sense of ‘ought to be’ rather than the less complex ‘to be’. In the
novel, this ideal picture of the self is strongly connected to a concern with the past, a
preoccupation with history as a determining factor of who we are and who we should be.
Since no history, no version of the past, is ever objective or purely factual, interpretation plays
an important role in the book. Versions of the past that the narrator delivers to us, readers, we
subsequently hear being re-interpreted by characters. These interpretations then serve to
enable the characters to interpret themselves and their actions in the light of this past. There
is, however, a gradual, mostly generational difference when it comes to this reliance on the
past. The younger generations seem to allow more space for and are more accepting of the
present, a difference I will explore more fully in the next chapter.
In this chapter I want to show how Zadie Smith connects this preoccupation with the
past, which is as often as not expressed in a concern for the future, to the construction of
identity using farce. The first section will examine to what extent the novel can be said to be a
farce itself, and in what way it employs farce on a narrative level. Having thus established a
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basis for the use of farce in the novel, I will then move on to a discussion of the way the
construction of identity in relation to history leads to farcical identities in White Teeth. The
remaining sections of this chapter will focus in the characters that rely heavily on the past,
while the next chapter will discuss the characters who attempt to move on from the past to the
present.
2.1
Farce in White Teeth
The comic nature of White Teeth is beyond dispute, but the exact shape this comicality takes
has given rise to many different categorisations, such as comedy, satire, saga and, famourly,
hysterical realism (Bentley “Zadie” 55; Quinn; Wood). Relevant as these categorisations may
be, the dominant presence of farce should not be overlooked. Not only does it contribute
greatly to the effectiveness of many of the comic scenes in the novel, it is also central to the
development of the characters. However, being fully aware that treating farce as a literary
genre is problematic since most novels cannot sustain the lack of moral concern inherent to
short farce (Howe 6), I want argue that White Teeth relies heavily on farcical elements in its
use of comedy, but as a novel cannot be said to be a farce. Indeed, there are too many other
elements of the novel, including a touch of the tragic (Aldama 88), that exclude any exclusive
definition of the novel as farce. Its use of farce on a narrative and thematic level, however, is
overwhelming; almost on every page can we find a line or a scene that makes use of farce. So
much so that I will have to drastically limit my discussion of generic farce in White Teeth to a
few distinctive examples that are both highly pertinent to the nature of farce and typical for
the novel.
A first typically farcical device is the confusion of identities, the question of who is
who (Heilman 115), which in the novel is clearly present in the shape of the twins Magid and
Millat Iqbal. Smith plays with this idea of doppelgänger, culminating in an actual mix-up at
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the end of the novel. When the two boys are separated because their father, Samad Iqbal,
decides to send Magid back to Bangladesh for a proper religious and cultural education, their
lives are lived in a curious parallel that subtly plays with the idea of confusion of identity.
Both boys break their nose, which keeps their physical appearance similar (Smith 213, 216)
and there are “similar illnesses, simultaneous accidents, pets dying continents apart” and
shared close brushes with death (220). It is unclear where Magid ends and Millat begins, as if
theirs is a shared identity. Ironically, these merged identities become more separate again on
Magid’s return to London, eight years later. This does not mean that their identities are less
confused, or confusing. Instead, Smith uses this separation of identities to move closer to the
actual exchange of identities that is often part of farce. She plays with the expectation of
identity created by Samad, who sent Magid to Bangladesh “in the hope that contact with his
roots and immersion in Muslim culture [would] make of him a true Muslim” (Sell 30). Millat
he already considers lost to the corruptive influence of immoral English culture and society.
To Samad’s great confusion then, “[t]he one I send home comes out a pukka Englishman,
white suited, silly wig lawyer. The one I keep here is fully paid-up green bow-tie wearing
fundamentalist terrorist” (Smith 407). Magid has become “[m]ore English than the English”
(Smith 406), as made abundantly clear when Magid visits O’Connell’s and Denzel remarks
that his suit reminds him of “what de Englishmen use ta wear back home in Jamaica” (450),
while Millat has become part of the militant Muslim group KEVIN and starts praying
frantically to Allah after having slept with Irie, horrified by his own deed (461). This
exchange of identities then finds its completion in a confusion of identities traditional to farce.
When Millat attempts to shoot Dr. Perret at the FutureMouse© event, it is doppelgänger
Magid who saves him from having to take full responsibility for his actions, because “the
eyewitness statements [...] identified Magid as many times as Millat” (541).
Another prominent element of farce is its physicality (Heilman 114), something on
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which the farce in White Teeth thrives. A clear example is Samad and Alsana’s habit to fight
when they need to settle an argument: the person who defeats the other physically is
considered the winner of an argument that could not be settled verbally. This connects to
another major element of farce that draws on marital discord (Howe 5). In White Teeth this is
especially effective, because Alsana mostly beats Samad. Smith plays both with the idea that
a man should be able to have some form of control over his wife and with the idea that
Muslim women are by definition submissive and oppressed. By ridiculing Samad’s position
as a husband she also ridicules these notions. This is especially clear in the scene where
Samad and Alsana are attending a meeting of parent-governors at the twins’ school. Samad
has gotten into the habit of putting forth motion after motion at these meetings, to the
exasperation of everybody including his wife. Smith opens the scene with Samad preparing to
put forth yet another motion, but being resisted by Alsana.
‘Put your hand down.’
‘I will not put it down.’
‘Put it down, please.’
‘Let go of me.’ (Smith 126).
As usual, the argument starts out verbally, but already the physical element of this argument is
being introduced, as Samad insists that Alsana let go of him. This promise of a struggle
smoulders as Samad puts forward his motion, and it is when the chairwoman gets around to
collecting votes that the real fight erupts. “Samad pressed Alsana’s hand. She kicked him in
the ankle. He stamped on her toe. She pinched his flank. He bent back her little finger and she
grudgingly raised her right arm while deftly elbowing him in the crotch with her left” (130).
What makes this little scene so effective is its slyness and speed in combination with the
straightforward physical portrayal of the action. Smith provides us with a little private insight
into the relationship of Alsana and Samad, insight that “Janice and Ellen [who] looked over to
[Alsana] with the piteous, saddened smile they reserved for subjugated Muslim women” are
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clearly not privy to (130-1). Interestingly, this same tension between Alsana and Samad is
also played out on a linguistic level, adding to the farcical effects that dominate their
relationship and tying in to the role that dialogue plays in farce (Stephenson 90). Alsana’s
revenge on her husband for sending Magid back to Bangladesh without her consent consists
of letting him live in an uncertainty similar to her own: she resolves never to say yes or no to
him again, until she has her son safely back in her arms. This means that whenever Samad
asks her something, he receives a reply along the lines of “[m]aybe, Samad Miah, maybe not,”
with seasonal variations (213). Part of the effect of this device is that, whenever Smith
provides us with a conversation between Alsana and Samad, we anticipate Alsana’s equivocal
answers and Samad’s frustrated response and are consequently released into laughter when
this indeed happens.
A final and crucial element of both farce and White Teeth I want to address here is the
use of stock characters, or caricatures. Farce is very much driven by action, and very little by
plot (Howe 5), which does not allow for very complex characters. By presenting the audience
with easily recognisable characters, farce promises instant comedy. Providing her characters
with too little depth is precisely what James Wood criticises Zadie Smith for concerning
White Teeth. He notices a lack in her characters, and “[t]hat lack is the human,” although he
softens his criticism by pointing out that Smith’s “principal characters move in and out of
human depth.” It is indeed true that many of White Teeth’s characters are rather one-sided.
There is for example Samad, a major figure in the novel, who “spends most of the novel in a
fury – he is, precisely, a caricature more than a character – about England and English
secularism” (Wood). In a similar way, Joyce Chalfen is stereotypically blind to her own
liberal form of racism; Alsana becomes a caricature of the Indian woman sewing away at her
Singer to meet the excessive demands of the Western consumer; Magid is the personification
of the Anglicised colonised subject; even Irie, one of the most rounded characters in the
17
novel, at some point becomes the caricature of the black girl thinking that a return to her roots
will prove to be the answer to everything. Whether one sees this lack of depth in the
characters as a deficiency of the novel and an obstacle to empathise with the characters, or as
a successful achievement of accessible comedy in a novel that is serious enough in its theme
already, these stereotypical representations of the characters contribute greatly to the farcical
nature of White Teeth.
The elements of farce in White Teeth discussed above are all examples of the short
farce that flourishes through its brevity and simplicity. However, another form of farce goes
beyond the superficiality of regular farce and instead attempts to provide us with a deeper
insight. When farce extends itself beyond its usual brevity, we indeed expect it to be more
serious (Stephenson 89), to yield something beyond “a brief holiday from responsibility”
through laughter (Heilman 123).
2.2
Living in the Past: Samad Iqbal and Archibald Jones
In this section I will move on to a different level of farce that does not necessarily lie in the
direct representation of characters and events themselves (though that is often the case as
well), but that takes place at the level of interpretation and revolves around the question to
what extent the identities that emerge from an interpretation of the novel are farcical. The
lack of depth of the characters discussed above does indeed contribute to the idea of a farcical
identity, but in this analysis I want to go beyond such a superficial categorisation. In this
section I will discuss the way characters are being determined by or define themselves
according to their historical, national, and cultural background, instead of the reality of their
current circumstances, resulting in identities that are a farce. This is particularly true of the
older generations in the novel, Samad and Archie and the Chalfens. Laura Moss points out
that the characters struggle with history, at the same time trying to leave it behind and
18
holding on to it as a lifebuoy (11). This struggle is highly personal and consists, among other
things, of an attempt to come to terms with who they are in the present in the light of the past.
As Moss again states, “Smith inextricably links the identity of the characters, ‘themselves’,
with the inescapability of history” (11). Not only is this struggle personal, history itself
becomes very personal in White Teeth. Instead of functioning as a form of collective
memory, the past is being shaped to cater to the characters’ sense of self. This occupation
with the past contributes to the construction of farcical identities in White Teeth.
Samad Iqbal is a Bengali Muslim who fought in the camp of the British during the
Second World War, alongside Archibald Jones with whom he struck up a friendship. After
the war, both men returned to their homelands, but thirty years later “in the spring of 1973
Samad [came] to England, a middle-aged man seeking a new life with his twenty-year-old
new bride” Alsana Begum (Smith 12). Even though Samad has come to England “seeking a
new life,” his old life proves hard to let go. He sees English society and culture as a direct
antagonist to Bengal’s traditions and culture, and a threat to his Bengali identity. Mindi
McMann points out that even though Samad is “considered part of the growing and
encompassing category of Black British, he resists embracing the generic nature of the first
part of that term, and he is not British enough for the second” (625). However, Samad may be
more British than McMann allows for. The years spent in England do not leave Samad
untouched, as he is painfully aware himself. “Think,” he tells himself, “I want another
woman [...]. I eat bacon. I regularly slap the salami. I drink Guinness. My best friend is a
kaffir non-believer” (Smith 149). Even his clothing is a comic misrepresentation of his
desired identity as he wears a “blue-towelling jogging suit topped off with Poppy’s LA
Raiders Baseball cap” instead of the traditional lungi (199), and he makes deals with Allah
based on Christian principles (“To the pure all things are pure”) and English idioms (“Can’t
say fairer than that”) (137). All of this, Samad desperately wants to believe, is the fault of
19
English culture that has corrupted his purity as a Bengali Muslim (Lowe 177). The way
Samad’s actions routinely belie his professed intentions and beliefs makes him a comic figure
and provides a first layer of farce to his identity. He is the classic religious hypocrite at whose
moralising sermons we scoff, as his wife Alsana often does, since he does not live up to them
himself.
However, this hypocrisy in Samad is also a sign of a tragic internal schism that makes
him unable to accept the reality that identities, including his own, are constructed out of
multiple influences. Even though he is the embodiment of hybridity, living in “[a] new third
space that redefines what it means to be both Bengali and British” (McMann 625), he is
unable to acknowledge or accept this reality. As Jonathan Sell argues in his article about
White Teeth as a potential model for multicultural identity, “for people like Samad [...],
identity can, or needs to be, circumscribed or given form and they accordingly avail
themselves of historical, cultural and genetic determinants to do so; and if that form is to
square with new realities, it must be given new contours” (41-2). It seems, however, that
Samad fails to provide himself with these new contours for a new reality. Instead, in an
attempt to counter the corruptive English influences and assert the stability of his identity, he
clings to the past of his familial heritage in the figure of his heroic great-grandfather Mangal
Pande “flailing with a musket; fighting against the new, holding on to tradition” (Smith 180).
This tragic backdrop allows Smith to exploit Samad as a farcical character, strengthening his
caricature of the angry immigrant resisting the host culture, and exposing him as a funny old
man unable to realise his version of the past has lost its relevance. Pande cearly is not the
hero that Samad believes him to be, and the more Samad insists the more Pande is turned into
a grotesque and laughable failure. Furthermore, instead of creating the analogy between
himself and his ancestor as two brave men resisting the English influence at the cost of their
life, Samad only too well resembles Pande’s failed revolt against the corrupting presence of
20
the English, only increasing the stereotype of his character. He is a voice in the wilderness,
and the louder he cries that he is Bengali rather than British, the more obvious it becomes that
he is both. This comic hypocrisy of his character undermines the reader’s potential empathy
with the tragic side of his character. Samad’s insistent identification with his greatgrandfather turns him into a farcical character and prevents him from progressing into any
meaningful sense of self.
Archibald Jones is stuck in the past in an entirely different way from his friend. Where
Samad acknowledges the existence of change and difference through his constant struggle
against it, Archie is the epitome of blissful ignorance. He seems to have little in the way of
backbone and “has given up trying to be anything” (Lowe 177). Smith provides us early on in
the book with a light-hearted but profoundly revealing characterisation of Archie as
a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along
familiar ratios:
Pebble: Beach.
Raindrop: Ocean.
Needle: Haystack. (11)
Throughout the novel this image of Archie is reconfirmed, often humorously portraying his
lack of personality. He relies on the flip of a coin for minor and major decision alike, whether
it is a red coat stand or his own life, a flip of the coin decides their destiny (52; 3). Archie’s
habit of flipping a coin becomes comic through its repetition, and as so often with Smith’s use
of humour in the novel, it shortly diverts attention from the more serious nature of the matter
the coin is supposed to settle, only to then reveal it more starkly. Another of Archie’s
characteristics is his use of stock phrases. Whenever he feels uncertain about what is expected
of him, the childish phrase “I should cocoa!” is there to help him out (70), and if he needs to
prove a point the sentence “there’s no smoke without fire” is all he needs (251). He collects
these bits and pieces of language he can trust never to fail him like a child collecting little
21
treasures, “adding them to the other pieces of sagacity the century has afforded him: You’re
either right or you ain’t. The golden age of Luncheon Vouchers is over. Can’t say fairer than
that. Heads or tails?” (524; Smith’s italics). Again, it is the repetitive nature of his habit that
contributed to its comic effect. We come to expect these pieces of stock wisdom, and when
Archie lives up to his own stereotype, he never fails to elicit a smile from the reader. In that
sense he is a typically farcical character. Archibald’s good-humoured, neutral view on life
might be seen as something positive, since it also means that his position towards difference is
largely innocent. “He kind of felt people should just live together, you know, in peace or
harmony or something” (Smith 190). Indeed, this “prosaic bloke-in-the-pub outlook” could be
seen as an indication of his acceptance of multiculturalism, corroborated by his friendship to
Bangladeshi Samad and Jamaican Clara (Quinn; Bentley, “Re-writing” 497). However, the
matter is slightly more complicated than that. His vague longing for harmony is based on his
aversion of conflict, his inability to take responsibility for a taken position. Moreover, his
friendship with Samad is based on two very dubious ideas about identity. In its early stages,
their friendship, the narrator almost mockingly informs us, took “as its basis physical
proximity and survives because the Englishman assumes the physical proximity will not
continue” (Smith 96). When this friendship is unexpectedly picked up again after thirty years
of separation, Archie is able to maintain it because he sees Alsana and Samad as “not those
kind of Indians” (54; Smith’s emphasis). In a similar way, he sees Clara as “not that kind of
black” (idem). Even his denial of racial difference might still be seen as something positive,
as it could be a starting point from which to work towards a future in which diversity is
naturally accepted as a natural feature of society. The problem is, however, that Archie’s way
of dealing with difference has no such intentions or consequences, but is simply the result of
the escapist impulse to avoid any kind of responsibility. This inability to cope with the reality
of a multicultural society and his dependence of set phrases and ready-made opinions reduce
22
Archie to a stock character, fulfilling a role similar to that of the court jester or fool
performing his antics to mask and divert attention from reality.
These two men then, each in their own way stuck in the past and each in their own
way a bit of laughingstock, these two men are friends. This friendship is central to the way
both men perceive themselves and, unsurprisingly, the friendship itself is defined by its
history: the shared experience of the war. However, this is precisely the finishing touch to the
farce of identity that is played out in these two characters. The story of origin of their
friendship, as it has been told to friends and family over the years, is indeed a founding myth.
There were no “bullets whizzing inches from your arse, while simultaneously capturing the
enemy in the harshest possible conditions,” as Samad likes to boast (Smith 225). Their war
only started when the real war had already ended, and it consisted of trying to fix a radio,
which provided Archi with his lifelong love for DIY (Smith 93), and attempting to execute a
sick and weak Nazi scientist while impersonating ranking officers on a drunk rampage (113).
This last event added yet another layer of deception to their friendship, as Archie chose to let
Samad believe he actually killed Dr. Perret, which for Samad was the defining act that made
Archie worthy of his friendship and admiration. This means that their friendship is built on
illusion after illusion, providing a frighteningly instable construction of identity for both
characters that goes against everything both men value most in life, formulated in Archie’s
appreciation of O’Connell’s as a place where “history was never revised or reinterpreted,
adapted or whitewashed. It was as solid and as simple as the encrusted egg on the clock”
(192).
2.3
Selective Memory: Joyce as the Epitome of Chalfenist Racism
At first glance the Chalfens may seem an unlikely choice to discuss in a chapter concerned
with the construction of identity based on an exaggerated focus on the past. Even though both
23
Joyce and Marcus are descendants from immigrant families, respectively Irish and Jewish,
this seems to be so far behind them that it does not exert any influence on their perceptions of
themselves anymore. Indeed, “their memory of their own immigrant past is so dim that they
are able to view the newer immigrants as ‘other’” (Lowe 168). Joyce, in particular, is
fascinated by Irie and Millat to such an extent that her theoretical acceptance and stimulation
of “cross-pollination” is put under pressure when facing some real-life specimens and
transforms into “some deep seated liberal intellectual racism” (Smith 309; Moss, “Politics”
15). A clear example is Joyce’s effort to emphasise the exotic in Millat and Irie in contrast to
her own Englishness by asking them where they are from. Their immediate and automatic
response “Willesden” does not gratify her, and she insists, “Yes, yes, of course, but where
originally?” (319; Smith’s emphasis). Even when Millat answers “‘Whitechapel [...]. Via the
Royal London Hospital and the 207 bus’” she and her family see it as an extremely witty
response, without seeming to understand its implications (319). As already pointed out above,
Joyce is something of a stock character in her inability to practice what she preaches when it
comes to dealing with difference. This would seem to indicate a concern with nationalism
more than with history per se.
However, this inability to cope with ethnic difference has other roots besides the loss
of memory described above. This loss of memory is highly selective, only blotting out the
immigrant aspect of their history and not, for example, the heritage of “good genes” that is
repeatedly emphasised by both Joyce and Marcus (311), as well as the related family trait of
being Chalfenist (318-9). This selective erasing of the past suggests that it may be this very
memory that causes them to emphasise the otherness of these relatively new immigrants. The
ghost of their own immigrant pasts haunts them and they use Chalfenism as a tool to prove
their true Englishness and, as a consequence, their right to a place in English society. As
Lowe argues, “[t]heir neurotic overreaching of themselves exposes how, in spite of their
24
professional success, they are still, at heart, afraid of racism, still insecure Jewish and Irish
immigrants who must ever prove their indispensability to society or face rejection” (176).
This also explains Joyce’s extremely hostile prejudices against the Iqbals and Joneses. She
assumes that Irie and Millat suffer from “a lack of a male role model” (Smith 325), she uses a
belief in “the Responsibility of the Intellectuals” to explain her extreme distrust of Alsana and
Clara’s competence to provide their children with what they need (353), and she tends to
blame Alsana whenever Millat comes knocking on her door with trouble (333). She is so
concerned with hiding who she used to be, an Irish immigrant, that she becomes a caricature
of that what she so desperately wants to be, English, using her and her family’s most
important asset, intelligence. Poppy Burt-Jones description of them to Samad speaks volumes
in this respect: “‘they are [...] intellectuals,’ she whispered, as if it were some exotic disease
of the tropics” (Smith 132; Smith’s emphasis).
25
3
In-Betweenness: Negotiating Past and Present
It is a huge discovery for Irie Jones that there are indeed people “who dealt in the present,
who didn’t drag ancient history around like a chain and ball. So there were men who were not
neck-high and sinking in the quagmire of the past” (Smith 326). Yes, there are men who do
not live their lives looking in the rear-view mirror, but more pertinently, in White Teeth there
are women and children who manage to keep their heads from turning. They recognise the
choice they have between past and present, the power to shape their own identity (Sell 32),
but they also live with the fact that to a certain extent the past is an inevitable presence and
influence. As Alsana ruminates when Joyce Chalfen is knocking on her door to discuss Millat,
being “[i]nvolved is neither good, nor bad. It is just a consequence of living, a consequence of
occupation and immigration, of empires and expansion, of living in each other’s pockets...one
becomes involved and it is a long trek back to being uninvolved” (Smith 439). As the
generational difference in attitudes towards the past in the novel suggests, the passing of time
is an important factor for the development of a more healthy relationship with the past. The
greater the distance between history and the present, the greater the potential to break free
from and overcoming the farcical, of becoming more than a stand-in for what has been. In
their search for a way to live in the here and now, these new generations become a complex
mix of history and ideals for the future, of farcical caricature and human depth. In this chapter
I will explore how a more flexible view on the past reduces the farce of identity. The first
section will focus on Alsana and Clara as a bridge between generations, a bridge between the
importance of roots and the necessity to be open to the future, to shape the future. This
internal struggle makes them characters who move back and forth between farce and human
depth. The second section centres on Magid and Millat, the Iqbal twins, who each in their own
way rely on the past and discard it in the shaping of their identities. The final section will
26
discuss Irie Jones as the character who is most able to break free from the restraints of the past
and who is therefore least farcical, personifying the promise for the future.
3.1
“Like a Breath of Fresh Air”: Alsana and Clara
Alsana and Clara are a younger generation married to Samad and Archie, men at least twentyfive years their senior. In his first year of marriage, Samad happily proclaims that his marriage
to Alsana “has given me this new lease on living, you understand? She opens up for me the
new possibilities” (Smith 12). However, Samad soon proves incapable to take this opportunity
of the breeze of fresh air Alsana provides to get rid of the cobwebs in his life. As for Archie,
Clara contained the promise of a new life for him as well, as he meets her on the morning of
the day that life decided to give him a second chance after his attempted suicide. However, his
brush with living in the here and now lasts even shorter than Samad’s.
One month into their marriage and he already had that funny glazed look men have
when they are looking through you. He had already reverted back into his
bachelorhood: pints with Samad Iqbal, dinner with Samad Iqbal, Sunday breakfast
with Samad Iqbal, every spare moment with the man in that bloody place,
O’Connell’s, in that bloody dive. (48; Smith’s emphasis)
Alsana formulates the reason for who Archie and Samad are, as husbands. Pregnant herself
and sitting in the park with Niece-of-Shame Neena and Clara, who is also expecting,
discussing the necessity of not knowing too much, not digging too deep in a marriage like
theirs, Alsana explains, “[w]e married old men, you see? These bumps’ – Alsana pats them
both – ‘they will always have daddy-long-legs for fathers. One leg in the present, one in the
past. No talking will change this. Their roots will always be tangled” (80). They have married
the past embodied and this serves them both as a background against which to develop their
own ideals for themselves and their children, and as a safety net to which they can every now
and then return when exploring this unfamiliar territory of the present.
27
Clara expresses her ideal for the future by acquiring the education that her marriage to
Archie prevented her from getting earlier. She devours the books with which Neena provides
her in “a clandestine attempt [...] to rid Clara of her ‘false consciousness’” (78). From then on,
Clara takes it into her own hands to educate herself and she starts taking courses at university
level. But education inevitably starts in the past and works its way towards the present, so
Clara dives into a past to which she can relate personally, taking courses like “British
Imperialism 1765 to the present; Medieval Welsh Literature; Black Feminism” (342-3).
Interestingly, this focus on the past does not lead her into the same trap as Archie and Samad.
Instead, she tries to look ahead and encourages the children to think for themselves. When
Samad is once again lecturing Irie and Millat on how to see the past, Clara softly buds in
saying “I don’t think [...] that we should discourage the kids from having an opinion. It’s good
that they are free-thinkers” (241). In addition, when everybody is trying to find “some neutral
place” where the estranged Magid and Millat can meet in an attempt to build bridges, “some
ground where they both felt no pressures or outside influences,” it is the room where Clara
studies every afternoon at the university that turns out to be the place least contaminated by
history (443). However, some history continues to haunt Clara, in particular the very recent
history of her religious upbringing as a Jehovah’s Witness. In the middle of a hurricane that
blew a tree right through the roof of their house, Clara says “Man, I’m terrified,” followed by
the memory of her grandmother saying that “[t]he quiet is just God pausing to take a breath
before he shouts all over again” (227). Another interesting example of Clara struggling with
history trying to work its way into her identity is her avowal to Joyce Chalfen that it is Charlie
Durham, her English grandfather, who brought the brains into the Bowden family (354).
Being shown the impressive family tree that Joyce has to boast about, Clara, unaware of the
Chalfens’ immigrant background and seeing them as the epitome of Englishness, feels
pressured into producing her own English ancestor to explain the presence of intelligence in
28
her family, even though she knows it “was a downright lie” (355).
Alsana’s approach to finding a way out of the maze of history is different than Clara’s
and consists of a live and let live policy, a tentative acceptance of difference. She
acknowledges the reality of the inevitable influence of a new environment, a new time, and is
willing to give it a chance. Thus it is Alsana who chides her husband for being frustrated
about Magid’s lack of faith and says, “[l]et go, Samad Miah. Let the boy go. He is second
generation – he was born here – naturally he will do things differently. You can’t plan
everything” (289; Smith’s emphasis). And it is Alsana who refuses to join her husband in his
fury against Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, “protecting [his] culture, shielding [his]
religion from abuse” (235) and his silent condoning of Millat’s participation in the riots and
book burning sparked by this novel. When she sees her son on television she burns all “his
secular stuff” on a great pile in the garden. “‘Either everything is sacred or nothing is. And if
he starts burning other people’s things, then he loses something sacred also’” (237). To
Alsana, valuing your own traditions does not automatically imply attacking ideas that diverge
from those traditions. She refuses the idea of a pure identity through heritage, challenging
Samad by saying “Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It’s a fairy-tale!” (236).
And yet, Alsana herself has not entirely shaken her dependence on the past, on roots, on the
certainty of a tradition being carried on. In spite of her own open-mindedness, she fears what
is, according to Smith’s narrator, the immigrants’ biggest fear, “dissolution, disappearance”
(327; Smith’s emphasis). Even Alsana is sometimes visited by a terrible vision where she sees
her offspring as other than herself, “their Bengali-ness thoroughly diluted, genotype hidden by
phenotype” (327).
This discussion of Alsana and Clara would seem to suggest there is little farcical about
them. They are grounded in the present more than the past, and except for Alsana’s
involvement in the farcical fights with Samad, they mostly appear to be non-comic characters.
29
However, the problem with Smith’s portrayal of Alsana and Clara is that they are mostly flat
characters. They only have a very small role in the story, especially Clara, who after having
been introduced as Archie’s wife almost disappears from the narrative entirely. Alsana
receives a little more space, but only in very specific moments. It seems like Smith is trying to
nip in the bud any feminist criticism of her novel by providing the two women with a level of
independence and open-mindedness that prejudice and stereotype would not usually
contribute to black, immigrant women. Thus Clara is providing herself with an education,
Alsana refuses to be dominated by her husband Samad, and Niece-of-Shame Neena is a
lesbian and artist. Unfortunately, however, as characters the women are so underdeveloped
that they become a caricature of the emancipating immigrant female. Any potential strength is
even further undermined because the novel exploits them on some level. Very bluntly stated,
Clara’s role is reduced to providing Irie, who is the centre of the story, and to being a black
woman educating herself, while Alsana is mostly a foil against which Samad is being
developed as a more rounded character (ironically with a farcical identity). The women do not
really have a place of their own in the novel, nor much of a voice. This, indeed, makes them
farcical in their attempts to raise themselves above what history expects them to be. Smith
herself has stated in an interview with Kathleen O’Grady that writing women is not her strong
suit,
I don’t write women very well and I don't really enjoy writing about them particularly.
At the moment. Maybe that will change at some point. I find them quite confusing as a
group of people. I think a lot of the women in White Teeth are failures more or less in
terms of rounded portrayals of people and that is kind of a shame. (“Conversation”
107)
In criticism too, Alsana and Clara are not much discussed, unless in passing remarks about
their respective positions to Samad and Archie. However, even though in the novel they may
not be fully developed to their potential, these two women initiate an attempt to mediate
30
between the past and the present, providing a first stepping-stone for themselves as well as
their children.
3.2
The Faults of Our Fathers: Magid and Millat
Alsana and Clara take the first careful step into the no man’s land between the past and the
future, called the present, but their children take this further in an attempt to reconcile the past
with the present. Each of them ends up both using history and discarding it in their process of
constructing their identity. Magid was born in England, but sent back to his parent’s
homeland Bangladesh at the age of nine to receive a traditional Bangladeshi upbringing.
However, being a former British colony, Bangladesh offers multiple forms of tradition and
heritage, one of them highly influenced by English culture and thought. Magid ends up having
to negotiate between these two forms of history and their influence on the present and,
“balancing the duality of his identity [...] appears to favour the British over the Bengali”
(McMann 627). The fact that he so heavily draws on the presence of English culture in Bengal
and returns as the school example of “the ideal colonial citizen” seems to suggest he relies
heavily on the past to define himself (628). However, at the same time he becomes highly
involved with Marcus Chalfen’s FutureMouse© project, which can be seen as a representation
of the future with its highly scientific and technological nature. Magid has found his own way
to juggle past, present and future into a mix that provides him with a realistic, albeit still
slightly imbalanced, foundation for his identity. Interestingly, his return to England upsets all
the ‘traditions’ that have been formed there in his absence as he sets off “seismic ripples” that
upset everybody’s delicately balanced position in the network of the three families (Smith
427). Not only that, he even upsets history itself by convincing Abdul-Mickey to serve bacon
in O’Connell’s and allow Archie once again to pay with Luncheon Vouchers (451). Magid
manages to overthrow the very idea of the reliability of tradition, of history, in the very
31
establishment that seemed to deny change any influence on time.
Millat, on the other hand, is left to grow up in the heart of English culture and is only
provided with Bengali influence through his parents, who themselves have inevitably also
become a mixture of Englishness and Bengaliness (even if Samad refuses to acknowledge
this). Millat seems to give in entirely to English and Western culture as he initially builds his
identity around street gangs and pop-culture, Robert DeNiro being more of a father figure to
him than Samad. He is a social chameleon who fits in with every gang and is worshipped by
boys and girls alike. However, “underneath it all, there remained an ever present anger and
hurt, the feeling of belonging nowhere that comes to people who belong everywhere” (269).
The separation from his brother and, more importantly, being neither entirely English nor
entirely Bangladeshi build up into confusion and anger (Moore-Gilbert 108), and eventually
draw him to KEVIN, a radical militant Muslim group whose aim is to fight against the
immoral influence of the West. Millat is desperate to belong, and KEVIN welcomes him with
open arms. This new identity he has found is connected to the religion of his father and his
cultural background, but is at the same time a new kind of Islam, born within the context of
and as a reaction against Western culture. In this sense, Millat breaks with the past through a
continuation of it. In a similar way, Millat draws on the history of Pande, his great-greatgrandfather. When KEVIN has failed to be as radical as it promised to be, Millat decides to
take matters into his own hands and kill the people responsible for the FutureMouse© project,
this “abomination” (Smith 463). Before entering the building where the event is to take place,
he is faced by the statue of Henry Havelock, Pande’s enemy, and in a moment of epiphany he
sees these two as symbols of how things have always been: the Pandes of history have been
nothing, and the Havelocks have been something. “That’s the long, long history of us and
them. That’s how it was. But no more” (506), because Millat is single-handedly going to put a
stop to this. Like his father, Millat takes pride and courage from the figure Mangal Pande, but
32
where Samad sees a hero, Millat sees somebody who had already lost in advance because of
who he was, because he did not belong. Consequently, he sees himself as the hero that Pande
never could be, as the person who will start the true reversal of roles, “[b]ecause Millat was
here to finish it. To revenge it. To turn that history around. He liked to think he had a different
attitude, a second generation attitude” (506). However, in his attempt to become that which is
needed to belong at least somewhere, Millat has lost all perspective on who he really is. Even
as he weighs the gun that will aid him in this act of faith in his hand, it is because he is so
familiar with Hollywood movies that the feeling of it is almost familiar to him (526). He has
lost sight of the fact that he is, undeniably, English too and “under [this] influence of radical
Islamic extremists, Millat cannot balance his identities” (McMann 628).
In this way, both brothers use history as a foundation for their identity, but at the same
time push it away and try to turn it into something new. However, it proves difficult for them
to find balance in this search for something in-between, something similar but different. Both
of them seem to become completely absorbed in the newness of what they have found,
apparently believing that they will be able to leave history behind entirely, oblivious to the
fact even they are still steeped in history, whether they acknowledge it or not.
the brothers will race towards the future only to find they more and more eloquently
express their past, that place where they have just been. Because this is the other thing
about immigrants (‘fugees, émigrés, travellers): they cannot escape their history any
more than you yourself can lose your shadow. (Smith 466; Smith’s emphasis)
It is exactly because they are entangled in the past without realising it that they threaten to
become stereotypes of the identities they are pursuing: Millat the fundamentalist and
extremist Muslim, and Magid the perfect example of the educated colonial citizen.
33
3.3
Crossing Borders: Irie Ambrosia Jones
With all the space that all the characters of three families take up, ultimately Irie Jones is the
centre of the novel. She is the most rounded character, most pronounced in her navigation
between the past and present towards the future, and least farcical in her identity. The way she
feels when entering the Chalfen household is representative of her role in the novel, as she is
“crossing borders, sneaking into England” (Smith 328). She is explicitly searching for her
place in English society, not resisting it or simply accepting it as the place she lives in, but
trying to find a space that is her own. In contrast to the twins, whose search for identity is
more defined by an awareness of cultural difference, Irie’s struggle is caused by her
realisation that the culture she is part of does not recognise her as one of its own because of
her deviating physical characteristics (McMann 632). She has her grandmother’s voluptuous
body with “ledges genetically designed with another country in mind another climate” instead
of the slender figure of the “English Rose” (Smith 266-7). In this country she feels she does
not exist, “[t]here was England, a gigantic mirror, and there was Irie, without reflection. A
stranger in a strange land” (266). Even this country’s cultural history, its literature, does not
allow her a glimpse of self-reflection. While reading Shakespeare’s sonnet 130 in class, Irie
for one moment thinks this might be a first step towards an existence for her in this country.
However, she is immediately excluded from any personal or cultural significance the poem
might have to her. The teacher pointedly reminds her that this could not possible have been
written about a black woman, since the only black women in Early Modern England would
have been slaves (271-2). Because Irie lacks the right to the historical eye that is required to
read this, since she is not part of that history as a black woman, she is denied access to the
potential relevance of this poem. So she continues to believe she is “all wrong” because she
has once more heard confirmed that to belong she needs to be “white, not multi-ethnic or
multiracial” (268; Smith’s emphasis; McMann 630). The only thing left to do for her, then, is
34
to try and achieve the ideal that she sees reflected back at her in Western popular culture by
attacking the one thing about her body that she might be able to change: her hair. It takes a
burned scalp, several hours of “plaiting somebody’s else’s hair in small sections to Irie’s own
two inches and sealing it with glue” and an honest look in the mirror to make her realise that
“the face staring back at her in the mirror is even more foreign, and still not legible as
beautiful in the narrowly Anglo definition of beauty that Irie has internalized” (McMann 630).
Once she has come to terms with the fact that her appearance belongs to who she is
and that it might even be considered to be beautiful (Smith 283), she shifts her focus from
who she is to where she comes from. She is in search of her roots, which include her
grandmother who, like her, was born from the union between a Jamaican woman and an
Englishman. To Irie Jamaica becomes a refuge, a place where “a young white captain could
meet a young black girl with no complications, both of them fresh and untainted and without
past or dictated future – a place where things simply were” (402; Smith’s emphasis). Reality
would have painted a different picture of course, but Irie had found a place to belong in the
past and
[s]he laid claim to [...] her version of the past – aggressively, as if retrieving
misdirected mail. So this was where she came from. This all belonged to her, her
birthright, like a pair of pearl earrings or a post office bond. X marks the spot, and Irie
put an X on everything she found, collecting bits and bobs [...] and storing them under
the sofa, so that as if by osmosis the richness of them would pass through the fabric
while she was sleeping and seep right into her. (400; Smith’s emphases)
Even though Irie’s version of the past she claims as her own might be opposite to Hortense’s
or Clara’s version of that same past (Moore-Gilbert 110-1), it helps her find a provisional
foundation to begin building an idea of herself she can accept. In a sense her use of history is
similar to Samad’s reliance on the past, as she lets her interpretation of history determine her
view of herself. However, contrary to Samad or Archie, Irie does not rigidly entrench herself
35
in this past. For her this is only the first stage in an ongoing process of discovering the past
and the way it can be relevant to her sense of self, a process that will eventually lead her to
put the significance of the past in perspective. Her interest in the past helps her to realise the
damaging and restrictive influence of the omnipresence of history in the lives of the Iqbals
and Joneses against which she ultimately revolts. When Alsana, Samad, Clara and Archie
start bickering once again about who is what and why, Irie explodes and confronts them with
an image of what ‘normal’ families are like (something that is again partly an idealist
fabrication of Irie). She tells them that these families just have
neutral spaces. And not this endless maze of present rooms and past rooms and the
things said in them years ago and everybody’s old historical shit all over the place.
They’re not constantly making the same old mistakes. They’re not always hearing the
same old shit. [...] And every single fucking day is not this huge battle between who
they are and who they should be, what they were and what they will be. (Smith 514-5)
Irie has had her own encounter with the maze of past and present and she is on her way out,
she has had her own struggle with who she was and who she should be, but she knows who
she is now and it appears to be exactly who she wants to be. It is no surprise then that in Irie,
the most hybridized character both ethnically and culturally, but also the character who has
managed to come to terms with this compilation of identity, we are presented with a view of
the future. She becomes pregnant from either Millat or Magid, as she sleeps with both within
the hour and as the boys are identical twins “Irie’s child can never be mapped exactly nor
spoken of with any certainty. Some secrets are permanent” (Smith 527). Irie’s child will have
English, Jamaican, Bangladeshi roots genetically and some Jewish-Irish influence culturally
in the figure of Josh Chalfen as its stepfather, and will come out of this curious mixture as
something entirely new. In that sense this unborn child is the promise of a future where
history has lost its defining power (Bentley, “Re-writing” 500). And indeed, that is what Irie
foresees. “In a vision, Irie has seen a time, a time not far from now, when roots won’t matter
36
any more because they can’t because they mustn’t because they’re too long and they’re too
tortuous and they’re just buried too damn deep. She looks forward to it” (Smith 527). Even
though this is again reminiscent of Irie’s description of normal families, ideal families who
know nothing about a struggle with identity in the face of history, and of her idealised version
of the Jamaican past, her ability to accept the present and to look forward makes her the least
farcical character of the novel.
37
4
Smith’s Double Vision of the Future
In his article “The ‘Ends’ of Postcolonialism” Theo D’haen draws on David Scott’s notion as
put forward in “The Social Construction of Postcolonialism” that the moment of
postcolonialism has passed since it has lost its critical edge and transformed into a method
rather than a critique (D’haen 2), to argue that the same has happened to multiculturalism.
And indeed, multiculturalism seems to have very much attained a status quo, in the sense that
it is generally agreed to be the preferred method of organisation for societies that partly
consist of ethnic minorities (although the political practices come in all shapes and sizes).
Even societies that have officially let go of multicultural policies in practice very often abide
by its principles (Bevelander and Taras 5). It seems multiculturalism has lost its “antagonistic
raison d’être” (D’haen 18), in the sense that it is still meaningful as a practice, but it may be
an answer to a question that is increasingly less relevant to the present reality of increasing
globalization and its influence on the experience and perception of nationalism and belonging.
D’haen sees White Teeth and its multi-ethnic cast of characters who struggle to attain a sense
of belonging as exemplary of a new postcolonial approach. He argues that the novel is not so
much concerned with multiculturalism as with the notion of belonging in general, and “in this
particular instance [...] a very local sense of belonging: to a specific neighborhood,
[Willesden], and to a particularly British sense of identity [...] marked, precisely, by the
impure and mixed rather than the pure” (16-7).
However, D’haen seems too optimistic and selective in his interpretation of the novel
and to attribute more prophetic vision to White Teeth than is its due, in my opinion. The
question of multiculturalism is very much present in the novel, since the very farce of the
character’s identities results from their (inadequate) search for a way to stay true to
themselves and their cultural background while living in an environment that is different from
it and urges them in a different direction. It is true that Smith appears to be probing for a
38
solution that is different than multiculturalism, but whether she has succeeded is less certain.
In this chapter I want to determine to what extent the farcical identities of the characters as
discussed in the previous chapter influence the possibility of a multicultural society in the
novel, and what, if any, solutions Smith offers to this crisis of identity on an individual and
collective level. The first section will concern the bulk of the novel and explore to what extent
the superficial image of multiculturalism that the novel presents holds out under the
undermining pressure of the farcical identities of its characters. The second section will deal
with the novel’s last few pages that are crucial to any interpretation of the novel, as they give
a hint of the future beyond the characters’ struggle with past and present, and will discuss
what Smith offers in terms of future perspective.
4.1
Multiculturalism and the Farce of Identity
At first sight, White Teeth may appear to want to show the success of multicultural London,
and particularly Willesden as a multicultural neighbourhood. The diversity of ethnic
backgrounds in the characters that the novel offers us is astounding, including Arabs, Indians,
Irish, Jews, Jamaicans, and English in the main cast, and adding even more to the list in minor
characters. “This has been the century of strangers,” the narrator informs us,
brown, yellow and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant
experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find
Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O’Rourke
bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last
names on a direct collision course. (326)
These strangers live their lives together, they are friends like Archie and Samad, they marry
like Clara and Archie, they grow up together like Irie, Millat and Magid, they are born from
parents with different ethnic backgrounds like Joshua, Irie, and her daughter. From this
perspective Smith, like Salman Rushdie in his novels, paints the picture of a century of
39
diversity that results in hybridity through “a desirable dialectical process in which different
traditions, cultures and identities merge to create a new, superior, unified third term” (MooreGilbert 108). This is a century of communities where there is no dominant group to lay down
the law, as Alsana suggests about Willesden (63). Even the children’s visit to the blatantly
racist Mr. J.P. Hamilton to bring him some food then only serves to confirm this vision. This
man is a relic of a past that has been caught up with. He serves as a foil that shows the way
things used to be, so the way things are now will stand out even better. In this way, White
Teeth has often been seen as the image of a successfully multicultural London, or at least an
optimistic outlook on its promising future (McLeod 231).
However, there have been other, more nuanced, voices about the novel. Nick Bentley,
for example, sees the novel as addressing London’s multicultural society in an attempt “to
challenge concerns that Englishness and multiculturalism are mutually antagonistic concepts,”
instead of simply celebrating a finished project (“Re-writing” 495). Claire Squires, too, warns
for “a critically naïve” interpretation of White Teeth as a novel that unequivocally celebrates
“the bright multicultural color of the Willesden streets” (43). The presence of multiculturalism
in the novel does indeed ask for a careful approach. The very diversity of the cast of
characters and the many events that take place both on a private and a public level do not
allow for a simple categorisation of the novel as a celebration of a multicultural reality,
particularly considering that it is a struggle with culture and identity that defines most of the
characters’ personal farce. In fact, these farcical identities undermine any potential success of
multiculturalism in this community, as they are essentially illusory. The adults in the novel
rely so heavily on rigid interpretations of the past to create a sense of self that they become
caricatures of themselves, stock characters in a struggling multicultural environment. Archie
the Englishman seems to be most farcical of all, as he is made up entirely out of stock
phrases, coin-flipping responses to situations. He is usually certain to elicit laughter in the
40
reader whenever he appears, which makes him fulfil the typically farcical role of providing “a
brief holiday from responsibility” (Heilman 123). At the same time, however, his farcical
identity exposes his lack of real identity and, consequently, his inability to connect
meaningfully with anyone else. His refusal to acknowledge the actual ethnic and cultural
differences between himself and Clara and the Iqbals is caused by this lack of identity, which
makes him unable to deal with anything deviating from his oversimplified view of the world.
The one scene where this contrast between the comic and the tragic aspect of Archie becomes
most clear is the only one-on-one conversation we ever see between Archie and Irie, the most
developed character of White Teeth, while they are on their way to the FutureMouse© event.
Archie is wondering at the increased complexity of bus tickets, characteristically longing back
to the time when tickets did not give you all this information, and your cousin Bill could just
hand you one for free “on the sly” (Smith 511). As Irie explains the new ticket to him, Archie
seems to sense that Irie is trying to have a meaningful conversation with him and that she
needs some form of reassurance from him. However, both sadly and funnily, he is unable to
respond to her silent request and instead lapses back into his habit of collecting bits and pieces
of linguistic wisdom (517). As another example, the Chalfens focus so much on difference
that they have difficulty realising they actually share a good deal with the immigrants they
turn into an exotic phenomenon, simply because they cling to their farcical role of the
exemplary intellectual English family in order to bury their own immigrant past. Then there is
Samad whose stereotypical religious hypocrisy is the main obstacle in his friendship to Archie
and the acceptance of what his sons have become. If on a personal level these characters are
unable to acknowledge and accept the reality and necessity of the co-existence of different
ethnicities and cultures, be it within themselves or in their community, then this will be even
more unlikely at a broader societal level, which something like the emergence of the radical
anti-Western group KEVIN amply demonstrates.
41
This does not mean that Smith criticises multiculturalism for its goals. Rather, she
acknowledges it is problematic to establish a multicultural society in an environment where
people keep having difficulty accepting difference, especially because of its potentially
contaminating effect. She shows how this fear works both ways. The English fear “infection,
penetration, miscegenation,” while the immigrant fears “dissolution, disappearance” (327;
Smith’s emphasis). If multiculturalism is a matter of mutual acceptance of and adjustment to
sameness and difference as Michael Murphy argues (149), then this mutual fear is indeed a
devastating obstacle. In their inability to accept reality, the characters attempt to create an
image of themselves on the basis of a purist and monolithic notion of culture and identity,
constructed from individual interpretations of their cultural past. This inability to
acknowledge the reality of a present determined by diverse cultural influences shapes their
farcical identities, as it prevents them from developing into anything beyond a stereotype of
the image they want to achieve or in Samad’s case, are trying to avoid. Multiculturalism as
represented in the novel has a surface image of flourishing diversity and hybridity; it is
showing its ideal identity. However, behind this façade are farcical identities who are
incapable of accepting difference (and, indeed, sameness). In this way, White Teeth’s
multiculturalism seems to become a farce itself. It is interesting that Smith uses the comic
device of farce to expose the almost tragic failure of multiculturalism’s ideals. White Teeth
shows us a form of multiculturalism that is almost like a stock-character itself, containing no
more depth than a few stereotypical aspects and unable to transcend its limitations. Any
deeper digging exposes its emptiness. In this sense, Smith does indeed show that
multiculturalism may have its best days behind it, as Theo D’haen suggests (18), but not
because it has lost its critical edge due to general acceptance, but because it has lost its
innovative advantage and reverted into a farcical representation of itself, content with the
daily drudgery of half-hearted success.
42
4.2
Beyond Multiculturalism: Irie as the Mother of the Future
White Teeth is not a book of despair, however. The humorous and farcical nature of the way
Smith portrays identity, both individual and collective identity, does not mean to imply that
the identities are a laughing-stock as much as invite us to acknowledge their defects and look
further. Smith herself attempts to provide us with a new outlook on the future. She invites us
to attempt a new approach along with her main character, Irie Jones, who is the only one to
escape the farce of identity so present in the novel. She is the only one who is able to
negotiate the past in relation to the present to the extent that she manages to look ahead into
the future with optimism. Smith seems to be suggesting that the future is brighter than the
current state of multiculturalism would indicate. The peek into the future that the last page of
the novel provides shows us Hortense, Irie, and her daughter together. All of them represent
an increasing level of hybridity, of roots getting tangled beyond the point where they could
ever be untangled again. Clara, born of parents who were both predominantly Jamaican, is
absent. This image of hybridity is enforced by Irie’s unity with Joshua, indicating that not
only the genetic roots of Irie’s daughter, but also her cultural roots will be increasingly
untraceable as she will be raised by an English-Jamaican mother and an English-Irish-Jewish
father figure, while the Bengali Magid and Millat, respectively raised in Bengal and England,
also figure prominently in her world as respectively the “good” and the “bad” uncle (Smith
541). The fact that Irie’s daughter’s roots will be obscured like this suggests a future where
identity will no longer be ruled by the past, and will have a chance to develop beyond farce.
Another indication that the past is losing its hold is the fact that Alsana and Clara join the men
in O’Connell’s, suggesting the power of history has lost some of its hold over this bastion of
the past, and indicating the gap between Samad and Archie, and Alsana and Clara has begun
to close. Finally, we are presented with the image of FutureMouse© escaping “the hands of
those who wished to pin it down” (542), escaping the scrutinising gaze of those attempting to
43
track its genetic path, in an analogy to Irie’s daughter who escapes any attempt to pin her
down ethnically or culturally.
However, there is another side to the coin of Smith’s presentation of the future. In a
similar way as the façade of multiculturalism hid a more severe reality, this image of the
future turns out to be utopian. Any attempt of the characters to escape the past entirely is in
vain, as Smith shows it catching up with them again. However meaningful the picture of Irie
with her grandmother and daughter is, the scene is set on a beach in Jamaica. This raises
questions about Irie’s continuing dependence on the past and her idealisation of Jamaica as a
promised land of possibilities, as well as the possibility of such a celebration of hybridity in
the community they are part of in London. At the same time, it signifies a return to “the
origins of [Irie’s] anxiety about and the disdain for her black body,” which undermines Irie’s
idealistic view of a future defined by hybridity (McMann 631). In addition, even the fact that
Clara and Alsana join their husbands in O’Connell’s sends a double message. Although they
are accepted as customers in O’Connell’s, this does not immediately change the fact that this
place has been one of the most important representations of the hold of the past over Samad
and Archie as farcical characters. In that sense, the two women who represented a first
attempt to break free from the debilitating weight of history do enter the very world where
change is almost impossible to achieve. Moreover, considering that the two women have been
highly underrepresented in the novel and have mostly been denied their own voice, the fact
that they now enter this men’s world dominated by history is disconcerting, especially since
this is a vision of the future of multiculturalism, or beyond multiculturalism. Feminism has
presented some searing criticism of multiculturalism, because its focus on the rights of ethnic
minority groups often tends to overlook the rights of disadvantaged groups, like women,
within these minority groups, as Susan Moller Okin eloquently argues in her article “Is
Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” The role that Alsana and Clara have had, or the lack of
44
one, culminating in this merging with the foundation of their husband’s farcical identities is
ominous rather than promising from this perspective. Finally, there is the hopeful image of the
mouse’s escape from its confinement as a reinforcing analogy to Irie’s daughter’s escape from
any form of definition. However, the mouse has been genetically modified, programmed
throughout its life. Even though it has escaped the scrutinising gaze of those mapping its
future, it can never escape the way its future has already been determined from the moment of
its conception. There is no escaping its past, no escaping its identity. “The link between Irie’s
unborn child and the escaped mouse emphasizes the possibility of a limited freedom from the
narratives that are imposed upon individuals” (Bentley, “Zadie” 61).
As Claire Squires points out, these double-edged predictions and suggestions about the
future of the characters are indicative that this future “may well be as fraught with the traps of
history, family and destiny” as the past (28). Indeed, Smith frames this view of the future with
two disclaimers about the inevitability of the past, and the fact that a future where roots will
have lost their importance is a utopia. “But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them,”
the narrator concludes the projection of the future, “would be to spread the myth, the wicked
lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect” (Smith 541). What is more, even
before beginning this future perfect presentation, the narrator lets us know that “the end is
simply the beginning of an even longer story” (540-1). This takes the discussion full circle
from the novel’s last page back to its epigraph which reads, “What is past is prologue,” taken
from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This has been interpreted to mean both that “[h]istory and
the past are formative and inescapable for the novel’s characters” (Squries 44), and as
“[a]nnouncing a break with the past, [heralding] a fresh concern for a present disembarrassed
of all complexes about historically determined origins and identities” (Sell 29). The latter
interpretation is nothing but an illusion in the light of the inescapable presence and influence
of the past as emerged from my analysis and discussion of White Teeth. Even Irie’s attempt to
45
escape by building a new reality where roots and history have lost their importance proves to
be an unattainable ideal. However, this does not mean that this presence of the past need
inevitably be the obstruction that it has been in the lives of most of the characters. Even
though we may not be able to remove ourselves from history entirely, we may indeed be able
to use the past as a stepping-stone towards the future by understanding its relevance and
significance (Freeman 23-4), similar to the process Irie went through in her discovery of the
past and its relevance. The impulse to be entirely rid of a sense of history may indeed prove to
be undesirable. Jeffrey Alexander points out that past and present provide us with a dialectic
that enables us to create a vision of and work towards a future that improves upon the past
(qtd. in Jawor 122). This adds another layer of unattainability to Irie’s attempted future,
because if achieved it would break apart the necessary dialectic for a further projection of the
future. Smith’s alternative for multiculturalism may therefore be as feeble and unrealistic as
multiculturalism itself, yet it does not have the same farcical effect. Where multiculturalism is
the superficial façade of a world where racial and cultural dichotomies still rule society, the
crumbling of Irie’s idealised future does not expose such a bleak view. Behind this ideal of
getting rid of the past lies the realistic option of ridding the past of its debilitating weight,
transforming it into a driving force instead, retaining its potentially powerful function. Irie’s
vision might never become reality, but may nevertheless be able to contribute to a world
where “otherness [becomes] a quality of life of each of us, human beings,” a world no longer
defined by thinking in terms of binary oppositions like us and them, black and white,
autochthone and immigrant (Jawor 134).
46
5
Conclusion
On White Teeth’s publication, many reviewers praised its comic tone while others criticised
that same humorousness as glibness (Squires 76). In this thesis I have attempted to show how
humour in the form of farce is a crucial part of the message that Smith is trying to convey
through her novel. Although White Teeth has often been seen as a novel celebrating the
multicultural reality of London, this is too simplistic an interpretation. Many of the novel’s
elements on the level of plot and narrative suggest a depiction of a successful multicultural
project. However, eventually the farcical identities of the characters who rely too heavily on
the past prevent any real progression towards acceptance of difference and the idea of a
collective identity. Indeed, in a way this turns the representation of multiculturalism in the
novel into a farce itself, as it becomes nothing more than an empty façade. Smith uses this
farcical representation to expose the fallibility of multiculturalism as it is, suggesting that a
new approach to and view on cultural and ethnical identities is required. It is through Irie’s
acceptance of the fact that her daughter “can never be mapped exactly nor spoken of with any
certainty” that Smith provides us with a new possibility (Smith 527). She present us with a
view of what Anna Jawor describes as a postmodern multiculturalism, where we are ourselves
but inevitably also the other, where there can no longer be spoken of ‘we’ and ‘they’ but only
of ‘both’, because ‘they’ are no longer different from ‘us’ since we are all simply different
(Jawor 134). Smith moves beyond multiculturalism by portraying a world where hybridity as
a denominator has lost its significance because it has become synonymous to being human.
Unfortunately Smith has limited herself to a discussion of identity in terms of race only, while
especially in a discussion of identity in multiculturalism gender and class also play an
important role. The gender aspect especially I perceive to be underrepresented in the novel, as
the female characters in the novel invite curiosity to see them develop into rounded
characters, but Smith never gives them the opportunity to show themselves. This is
47
interesting, especially since her vision of the future is expressly female through the vision of
Hortense, Irie and her daughter on a Jamaican beach. Since the focus of my thesis lay
elsewhere I lacked the space to explore the representation of the female characters further, but
this would prove to be an interesting topic of research. Another problematic and undermining
aspect of Smith’s view of hybridity as interchangeable with identity is that it is created on the
supposition that the past will have become obsolete and no longer figure in either present or
future. Even in the construction of her future, Smith shows this to be impossible, as the past is
both inescapable and indispensable. All is not lost, however, since this critical representation
of the future does not result in a farce like her representation of multiculturalism. Instead,
from the collision of Irie’s idealised future and the inescapable influence of the past arises a
new possibility, where the past stands in service of the future and contributes to the
development of a society where sameness and difference are no longer seen as opposites, but
as indistinguishable.
48
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